Blogs - hussainlok

Hi everyone! Today is the day, The Blacksmith’s Dungeon is officially released and available to play on itch.io at Ijcook.itch.io and on GameJolt at Gamejolt.com. Alternatively consider downloading the game for MacOS at Drive.google.com or for Windows at Drive.google.com.

Watch the trailer for our game over here on youtube!: Youtu.be

Our motivation for our changes this week was to fix all of our bugs we found via playtesting. We added a few features like a better UI bar at the top that displays your potions and bombs, a difficulty level selector, and better tutorial guidance. Aside from those, we spent the vast majority of our week adding more “juice” to the game and fine tuning our enemy difficulty levels as well as our coin and material economies.

Moving forward we hope to release updates to the game, adding new theme rooms/effects and fixing bugs! We hope you enjoy our game and look forward to your feedback!

Thanks,

Gray Box Studios

Our motivation for many of these changes was that we wanted to start to fine tune our game rather than focusing on adding too many new features. In previous weeks we had overloaded our tasks which gave our game many new themes and enemy types, but resulted in a poor level of attention to detail. We spent much of this week making up for this technical debt and using playtesting feedback to tweak parts of the game that are/were either broken or simply not fun. These changes include but are not limited to: a final boss, enemy scaling, player health, upgrade costs scaling linearly, streamlined and more intuitive UI, adding themed game art to the rooms to give them more character and polish, adding a permanent health bar, modifying the coin and material economies, and making the upgrade minigame more difficult and more rewarding!

Next week we plan to make more changes that will help refine the game and add polish as we prepare to publish. Some of the things we have on the docket are: further improving UI (using playtesting feedback), adding upgrade limits to avoid any upgrades from becoming overpowered, Potentially adding a new weapon and/or room (dependent on the feedback we get from our playtesting sessions). We plan on weighing our playtesting feedback especially heavily this week as we believe this is the feedback that will give the game

Watch the trailer for our game over here on youtube!: Youtube.com

You can download our Beta build for mac and windows online here: Drive.google.com

New this week: -added in the snowy theme -new snowman enemy -rolling variant -snowball throwing variant -new frost wizard enemy -inflicts new frost debuff -decreases entity attack, projectile, and movement speed -added new weapon type throwing dagger -gives the player a throwable, but short melee ranged weapon -updated UI -new custom designed elements -streamlined shop system -view the effects of your upgrades -increased minigame upgrade bonuses -updated rooms -new decorations to the starter room -shrunken tutorial room -added parallax to all rooms -more upgrades -weapon range -weapon attack speed -weapon attack rate -frost resistance -diamond dagger upgrades (all of trusty sword upgrades)

The motivation we had for these upgrades were spurred on by our previous implementations that did not meet the deadline, player feedback, and internal feedback. It was at this point in development where we felt we needed to heavily establish our game's identity, so we devoted a fair portion of our development cycle into refining our game feel, tutorial system, and overall design.

Our upcoming changes include: -new lava theme -2+ new enemies -2 new loot types -1 new status effect -2 new weapon types -final boss -further refinement to level design -feedback from peers and project members -and more!

Thanks! you can download the file here: Drive.google.com